Thursday, January 31, 2013

“I went into the Hickory
House in nineteen fifty-two,
and I was there most of the next eight years. The best trio I had was Bill
Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums. Sal Salvador
introduced me to Joe one night. He was at the bar, a skinny bean pole in a
raincoat, and he looked like a studious young chemist. I asked him to sit in,
and I was flabbergasted. I'd never heard anyone play drums like that. When
Mousie Alexander, who was with me then, left, Joe joined us, and I was so
enamored of his play­ing that I let him play a lot of solos."

Marian McPartland looks up at
the ceiling and laughs. "Whenever I think of Joe, I think of swinging. It
was im­possible not to swing with him.”

There are two
things I like best regarding the following essay.

The first is that
it is about Marian McPartland, one of my all-time favorite Jazz pianists.

The second is that
it was penned by Whitney Balliett, one of my all-time favorite writers.

Whitney’s essay
was originally published in the early 1970’s in The New Yorker Magazine, a learned publication for which he wrote
on the subject of Jazz for many years.

The piece antedates
Marian’s Piano Jazz, an NPR program
that would bring her well-deserved acclaim and more than likely a lot of
enjoyment as her program consisted of interviews with just about every exponent
of Jazz piano on the planet.

A marvelously
talent Jazz pianist and often overlooked, I will always be grateful to Marian
for bringing drummer Joe Morello into my life by way of her MarianMcPartland
at the Hickory House, a 10” Capitol LP [574] which was recorded in
Septembe5, 1954.

In his piece,
Whitney talks about New York and Jazz in New York as though they were the center of the
civilized world. Of course, each was at the time.

This is a lengthy
piece that for all intents and purposes reflects on a world gone by.

It’s a fascinating
story about a singularly talented woman who has contributed so much to Jazz
over the years.

Amazingly, at it’s
conclusion, Marian would add another forty years to its telling!

Although Marian is in
retirement today [Whitney died in 2007], the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought you might like
to share in a revisit with Whitney and Marian, chatting away in her cozy flat –
one day, when the world was young.

“Four scenes from
the life of Marian McPartland, the unique and graceful English-born jazz
pianist. The first scene takes place early in the spring.

She is seated at a
small upright piano in a corner of an ele­mentary-school classroom on Long Island. She has the polished, easy, expectant air
that she has when she is about to start a set in a nightclub. Her back is
ruler-straight, she is smiling, and her hands rest lightly on the keyboard.
And, as always, she is impeccably got up. Her blond hair, shaded by pale grays,
is carefully arranged, and she is wearing a faultlessly tailored pants suit.
Twenty or so six-year-olds, led into the classroom a few moments before by a
pair of teachers, are seated at her feet in a semicircle. She looks at a list
of kinds of weather the children have prepared. "All right, dears, what
have we here?" she says in a musical English alto. "Did all of you do
this?"

There is a gabble
of "yes"es.

"Hail, snow,
hurricane, cloudy day, rain, twister, fog, wind, the whole lot. Now, I'm going
to pick one out and play some­thing, and I want you to tell me what kind of
weather I'm play­ing about." She bends over the keyboard and, dropping her
left hand into her lap, constructs floating, gentle, Debussy chords with her
right hand. A girl with a budlike face and orange hair shoots a hand directly
at her and says, "Rain, gentle rain."

"That's very
good. It is rain, and gentle rain,
too. Now what's this?" She crooks her arms and pads lazily up and down the
keyboard on her forearms. She stops and smiles and gazes around the faces.
There is a puzzled silence. A boy with porcupine hair and huge eyes raises a hand,
falters, and pulls it down with his other hand. "Fog," says the
little girl.

Marian McPartland
laughs. "That's very close, dear, but it's not exactly right." She pads around on the keyboard again.
"What's like a blanket on the ground, a big blanket that goes as far as
you can see?" The large-eyed boy shoots his hand all the way up.
"Snow! Snow! Snow!"

"Right! But
what have we now?" Dropping her left hand again, she plays a quick, light,
intricate melody in the upper registers. "Twister!" a pie-faced boy
shouts. "No, hurricane," a boy next to him says.

"Could you
play it again?" one of the teachers asks.

"Well, I'll
try." She plays the melody, but it is not the same. It is a delightful
improvisation. There are more notes this time, and she plays with greater
intensity. "I think it's wind''
the orange-haired girl says.

"It is wind, and wind is what we get when we
have one of these." She launches into loud, stabbing chords that rush up
and down the keyboard and are broken by descending glissan-dos. She ends on a
crash. "Twister! Twister!" the pie-faced boy cries again.

She shakes her
head. "Now, listen, listen more
closely." Again she improvises on her invention, and before she is
finished there are shouts of "Thunder!" "Lightning!"
"Twister!"

"I don't
think I'd even know what a twister sounds like," she says, laughing.
"But the rest of you are very close. Which is it —thunder or
lightning?" She plays two flashing glisses. "Lightning!" a tiny,
almond-eyed girl yells.

"Very, very
good. Now this one is hard, but it's what we have a lot of in the summer."
She plays groups of crystalline chords in a medium tempo. It is sunlight. A
cloudy day and a breeze and a hurricane follow, and when the children's atten­tion
begins to wane, she starts "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." The
children get up and stand around the piano and sing, Two of them lean against
her. She finishes one chorus and starts another, and at her behest the children
clap in time. She gradually speeds up the tempo until the clapping is con­tinuous
and the children, hopping around as if they were on pogo sticks, are roaring
with laughter. She finishes with a loose, ringing tremolo. The teachers thank
her and sweep the children out of the room. She takes a lipstick out of an enor­mous
handbag and fixes her mouth. Then, in the empty room, she starts noodling a
medium-tempo blues. But soon it is all

there: the long,
tight, flowing single-note lines and the rich, sparring chords; the flawless
time; the far-out, searching har­monies; the emotional content, passed so
carefully from genera­tion to generation of jazz musicians; and the balancing,
smooth­ing taste. She plays three or four minutes, and then, as a group of
ten-year-olds comes billowing through the classroom door, she switches to the
Beatles' "Hey Jude."

Marian McPartland
lives in an apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street. It is on the seventeenth floor, and it
faces south. From the windows of her compact living room, the EmpireState and the ChryslerBuilding and New YorkHospital are knee-deep in an endless wash of
brownstones. There is a small terrace, with chairs and a couple of boxes of
geraniums. A grand piano, which faces away from the view, dominates the living
room. Paintings hang on two walls, and the third is covered with photographs, most
of which she is in. The business end of the piano is covered with sheet music
and musical manuscript, and there are careful stacks of records on the floor
below the photographs. She is wearing a flowered top and pants and a big
leather belt, and she looks mint-fresh. She makes tea and sits down facing the
panorama. She is extremely handsome. Her face, with its long, well-shaped nose,
high forehead, wide mouth, and full chin, is classically English. She smiles a
great deal and keeps her chin pointed several degrees above the horizon. She
has the figure of a well-proportioned twenty-year-old.

"I've been
teaching four or five years," she says, crossing her legs and taking a sip
of tea. "Clem De Rosa, a drummer and the musical director of the ColdSpringHarborHigh School, got me going. I teach about six weeks out
in that area every year. I started out doing assemblies with a quartet and then
with a trio, but I didn't think we were getting across to the kids. Last year,
I went into the classrooms with just a bass player, and this year I'm doing it
by myself. I love to work with the little ones — especially the slower ones. I
guess it has to do with listening. I'm trying to make them shed their fidgeting
and their fears and make them listen.
Very few of us ever learn how. I think I was first made conscious of it when I
was in kindergarten in England and we had a teacher who used to take us
on long walks in the woods and fields and make us listen to the birds and the
wind and the water lapping in brooks. During the summer, I teach and play at
college clinics, and it's terrific fun. Musicians like Clark Terry and Billy
Taylor and Gary Burton do a lot of it, too, so there are always wonderful
people to play with, to say nothing of the kids themselves. I wish there had
been clinics and such when I was growing up. Becoming a jazz musician in those
days, with my background and my sex, was like pulling teeth. It just 'wasn't
done,' as my father used to say. I was born in Slough, near Windsor. But we moved to Woolwich a few months
later, and then to Brom­ley, Kent, when I was about four. Bromley was much
nicer than Woolwich, which resembled Astoria, New York.”

“My family was
upper-middle-class and conservative. All my mother's side lived around Slough and Eton and Windsor. My great-uncle sang at St. George's Chapel at WindsorCastle, and my grandmother lived in The
Cloisters, on the grounds. Queen Elizabeth knighted another great-uncle, and
now he's Sir Cyril. He and Aunt Sylvia came over when I was working in New York at the original Hickory House in the
fifties, and they were shocked and mystified by the whole scene. Uncle Cyril
took me aside, between sets at the club, and said, 'Mar­garet' — I was born
Margaret Marian Turner — 'Margaret, does your father know what you're doing?' My father was a civil engineer who was
involved with machine tools. He was an avid gardener, and clever at everything
he did. When I was quite little, he made a goldfish pond with all sorts of
pretty rocks on the bottom. He let me help him, and it was a great source of
pride. I was Daddy's girl, in spite of the fact that I think he would have
liked me to be a boy. My mother always used to say to me when she was annoyed,
'You're just like your father, Margaret — pigheaded!' I think they did quite a
lot of bickering and carrying on. My mother was rather a critical person, but I
suppose it was her upbringing. It was forever 'Do this, do that, pick up behind
you, don't be late.' I was harassed by it, and it took me years to grow out of
it.”

“My schooling was
of the times. I started in at a one-room school, where I drew pictures of
little houses with snow falling. Then, for less than a year, I went to Avon
Cliffe, a private school run by two well-meaning women. I was a frog in the
school play, and I was not pleased by that. There was a nursing home, next to
the school, where my grandmother spent her last days, and she'd wave to me out
of the window every afternoon when I left. After that, I was sent to a convent
school. My sister, Joyce — there were just the two of us — was always ailing
with bronchitis, and I think my mother enjoyed hovering over her. But I was the
strong, healthy ox. Even so, I was scared of some of the nuns. I was hopeless
in some subjects, and they were always grabbing me by the neck and locking me
in the laundry room. My mother said I'd have to go to boarding school if I
didn't shape up. I didn't, so they put me in Stratford House, in a neighboring
town. It was a nice school for nice girls from nice families. We had a matron
with a starched headdress and we were told when it was our turn to take a bath
and we were taught how to make a bed with hospital corners. I couldn't stand
the school food or the smell of cooking, and I got sick headaches. But there
were good things. I think I learned how to string letters and words and
sentences together on paper. And I designed the school emblem — three sweet
peas, en­twined. It was quite beautiful. And I wrote the school song. "

“I had started
playing the piano when I was three or four. It was at my great-uncle Harry's,
and the keyboard was all yellow. And I remember playing, sitting up high on a
stool, at kindergarten with children all gathered around. My mother would make
me play for her friends, and while I played they all talked. When I finished,
she'd say, 'Oh, that was very nice, dear.' I was angry, but I wouldn't have
dared pop out with 'You weren't listening!' I didn't realize that the pattern
of my life was already set. I still play while people talk and then applaud.
When I was nine, I asked my mother if I could take piano lessons. She said,
'Margaret, you already play the piano very well. I think you should take up the
violin.' We went up to London and bought a violin, and I took lessons, but I never enjoyed the
instrument.”

“I played in
concerts and competitions, but then my teacher died, and that put an end to it.
I was studying elocution with Miss Mackie, at Stratford House, around this
time, and I had a crush on her. I used to ask my mother if she'd invite her
over for tea or dinner. Mummy was a nervous hostess, but finally Miss Mackie
came, and it was she who advised my parents to send me up to the Guildhall
School of Music, in London. My parents were always saying, 'You better think of what you're
going to do after school; we aren't going to keep you forever,' which made me
feel like a bit of aging merchandise. I went up to London and played for Sir Landon Ronald, who was
the head of the Guildhall, and I got in. I commuted every day from Bromley, and
I really worked. I studied composition and theory and piano, and I won a
scholarship in composition. I took up violin again, be­cause we students had to
have a second instrument, and I studied singing with Carrie Tubb, a retired
opera singer. The other day, I came across six pieces I wrote then. They have
titles like Tas Seul' and 'Reverie,' and actually they are pretty well put
together. But I'd never claim then that anything I'd done was good. The
reaction would have been immediate: 'How can you be so immodest, Margaret!''

The telephone
rings, and Marian McPartland talks for a minute. "That was Sam Goody's.
They want more of my records. Some women buy fur coats; I have my own record
company. It's called Halcyon, and I've put out four albums to date — three with
myself and rhythm, and some duets with Teddy Wilson, which turned out
surprisingly well. Sherman Fairchild helped me get it going. He died two years
ago, and he was a great jazz buff and a friend for twenty years. Bill
Weilbacher, who has his own label,
Master Jazz Recordings, gives me advice, and a small packaging firm handles the
dis­tribution and such. A printing of five thousand LPs costs around fifteen
hundred dollars. Whatever I make I put right back into the next record. The big
companies are impossible, and a lot of musicians have their own labels. Stan
Kenton has his, George Shearing has his, Clark Terry has his, and Bobby Hackett
has started one. I think this do-it-yourself movement is terribly important,
particularly in the area of reissues. What with all the mergers among recording
companies, I'm afraid of valuable records being lost. Not long ago, I wrote the
company that recorded me at the Hickory House in the fifties and asked if they
intended reissuing any of the albums. I think they'd have some value now. But I
got the vaguest letter back. So they won't reissue the records, nor will they
let me. It's not right. I think that musicians should get together catalogues
of everything they've recorded and perhaps form some sort of cooperative for
reissuing valuable stuff. Anyway . . ."

Marian McPartland
laughs, and says she is going to make lunch.

She sets a small
table and puts out pumpernickel and a fresh fruit salad. "I was listening
to everything indiscriminately at the Guildhall, and I was beginning to learn
all sorts of tunes. I have fantastic recall, but I don't know where half the
music that is stored in my head has come from. I also started listen­ing to
jazz — the Hot Club of France, Duke Ellington's 'Blue Goose,' Sidney Bechet,
Teddy Wilson, Bob Zurke, Art Tatum, and the wonderful Alec Wilder octets. I was
playing a sort of cocktail piano outside of the classroom, and once, when my
piano professor at the Guildhall, a solemn little white-haired man named
Orlando Morgan, heard me, he said, 'Don't let me catch you playing that rubbish
again.' Well, he never got the chance. One day I sneaked over to the West End, where Billy Mayerl had a studio. He
played a lot on the BBC, and he was like Frankie Carle or Eddy Duchin. I played 'Where Are
You?' for him, and a little later he asked me to join a piano quartet he was
putting together — Billy Mayerl and His Claviers. I was twenty, and I was
tremendously excited. The family were horrified, but I said I'd go back to the
Guildhall when the tour was over. My father charged up to London to see 'this Billy Mayerl/ He didn't want
any daughter of his being preyed on, and he wanted to know what I'd be paid —
ten pounds a week, it turned out. So my parents agreed. The quartet included
Billy and George Myddelton and Dorothy Carless and myself. She and I were
outfitted in glamorous gowns, and we played music-hall stuff. We played variety
theaters — a week in each town. We lived in rented digs in somebody's house. If
it was 'all in,' it included food. Some of the places were great, and they'd
even bring you up a cup of tea in the morning. Mean­while, my family had moved
to Eastbourne.”

“The tour with
Billy lasted almost a year, and then I joined Carroll Levis's Discoveries, a
vaudeville show, and I was with them until the early years of the war. By this
time, my family had given up on me. But my father would catch me on his
business trips, and he'd come backstage and wow all the girls in the cast. I
was going around with the manager of the show. He was a come­dian, and he was
also Jewish. My father would take us out to dinner and he would manfully try
not to be patronizing. But it was beyond him. He would have liked me to work in
a bank or be a teacher, and here I was playing popular music and going around
with someone who was not 'top drawer.' I don't think it was real anti-Semitism;
you just didn't go around with Jews and tradespeople. When I was five or six,
and my mother found out that one of my friends was the daughter of a
liquor-store owner, I wasn't allowed to see her anymore."

The phone rings
again, and Marian McPartland talks with animation. "That was my dear
friend Alec Wilder. He wanted to know if I'd done any writing today. He's
incessant, but he's right. For a long time I procrastinated and procrastinated.
I'd start things and let them sit around forever before finishing them. Alec
gave me a set of notebooks, and I jot ideas down in them in cabs and at the
hairdresser. Tony Bennett recorded my 'Twilight World,' which Johnny Mercer
wrote the lyrics for, and it's just come out on Tony's new LP. Johnny is
another great friend. One evening, he and Ginger, his wife, and his mother came
up here, and Johnny sat right over there by the piano and sang about fifteen
songs. It was a marvelous ex­perience." Marian McPartland clears the
table, and sits down in the living room with a fresh cup of tea.

"In nineteen
forty-three, I
volunteered for ENSA, which was the English equivalent of the USO. I traveled
all over England with the same sort of groups I'd been
with, and then I switched to the USO, which paid better and which meant working
with the Americans! Boy, the Americans! The fall of nineteen forty-four, we were sent to France. We were given fatigues and hel­mets and
mess kits, and we lived in tents and ate in orchards and jumped into hedgerows
when the Germans came over. At first I played accordion because there weren't
any pianos around. I met Fred Astaire and DinahShore and Edward G. Robinson, and I worked with
Astaire in a show that we gave for Eisenhower. We moved up through Caen, which was all rubble, and into Belgium, where I met Jimmy McPartland. A jam
session was going on in a big tent, and I was playing, and in walked Jimmy and
saw me — a female white English musician — and the my-God, what-could-be-worse
expression on his face was clear right across the room. But it was a case of
propinquity, and in the weeks to come it was Jimmy on cornet and me and a bass
player and whatever drummer we could find. We'd go up near the front and play
in tents or outside, and it was cold. He annoyed me at first because he almost
always had this silly grin on his face, but I found out that it was be­cause he
was drinking a great deal. Somewhere along the line he said, 'Let's get
married.' I didn't believe him, so one morn­ing I went over to his place very
early, when I knew he'd be hung over and close to reality, and asked him if he
really meant it, and he said sure and took a drink of armagnac. I guess I was
madly in love with him. We were married in February, in Aachen, and we played at our own wedding.

"When we got
to New
York,
early in nineteen forty-six, we went straight to Eddie Condon's, in the Village. I was so ex­cited
I couldn't stand it. Jimmy sat in and so did I, even though my left wrist,
which I'd broken in a jeep in Germany, was still in a cast. We stayed for a
while with Gene Krupa, then we went to Chicago to stay with Jimmy's family. A colonel
with our outfit had given the news of my marriage to my parents when he was on
leave in England. My father was stiff-upper-lip, but Mummy
told me she cried a whole day. I guess my not telling them first was a rotten
thing to do, but we were so isolated. You couldn't just pick up a phone at the
front and tell them you were going to get married. But when Jimmy finally met
them, he charmed them completely. My mother was really crippled with arthritis
by then, and he made her laugh, and Jimmy took my father to the movies. They
told me, 'He's not like an American. He's so polite/ In Chicago, I became
greatest of friends with Jimmy's daughter, Dorothy, who was very beautiful and
just fifteen. Jimmy had been married before, and Dorothy had been their only
child. Jimmy had sent a lot of money back from Europe, and the first six months in Chicago were spent hanging out and treating
people. All anybody seemed to do was drink, including Jimmy, and eventually it
got to be one crisis after another. I left him a couple of times, and once I
even booked passage on the Queen Elizabeth. But it was all done without much
thought; I seemed such a brain­less person then. And I think I must have been
quite awful to Jimmy. One of Mummy's dire predictions was If you become a
musician, Margaret, you'll marry a musician and live in an attic.' And that's
exactly what happened; our first place in Chicago was a furnished room in an attic. But
there were a lot of nice times, too. Jimmy and I started working together, and
Jimmy was always marvelous in that he was proud of me, he wanted to show me
off. We worked with Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan and Anita O'Day, and I met
Duke Ellington and Count Basie. And we'd go fishing up in Wisconsin and sit there by some lake and cook fish
and eat them and watch the sun rise. I had learned all the good old Dixieland
tunes from Jimmy, but I was also listening to the new sounds — Charlie Ventura
and Lennie Tristano and Charlie Parker.

"Jimmy and I
had split up, musically, by the early fifties, and my first gig all by myself
in America was at the St. Charles Hotel, in St. Charles, Illinois, and not long after that I left for New York. I played solo piano at Condon's and then
I went into the Embers, with Eddie Safranski on bass and Don Lamond on drums.
Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge were brought in as guest stars, and we backed
them. I was so nervous I had to write down what I was supposed to say at the
close of each set. I played Storyville, in Boston, and then I went into the Hickory House in
nineteen fifty-two, and I was there most of the next eight years. The best trio I had
was Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums. Sal Salvador introduced me to Joe one night. He was at
the bar, a skinny bean pole in a raincoat, and he looked like a studious young
chemist. I asked him to sit in, and I was flabbergasted. I'd never heard anyone
play drums like that. When Mousie Alexander, who was with me then, left, Joe
joined us, and I was so enamored of his play­ing that I let him play a lot of
solos."

Marian McPartland
looks up at the ceiling and laughs. "Whenever I think of Joe, I think of
swinging. It was im­possible not to swing with him. And whenever I think of
swinging, I think metaphorically. Swinging is like being on a tightrope or a
roller coaster. It's like walking in space. It's like a souffle: it rises and
rises and rises. The fingers and the mind are welded together. But it's dangerous.
You have to leave spaces in your playing. You can't go on like a typewriter.
Sometimes I do, though, and I leave no note unplayed. It's hard to say what
goes on in your head when you're swinging, when you're really improvising. I do
know I see the different keys in colors — the key of D is daffodil yellow, B
major is maroon, and B flat is blue. Different musicians spark you into different
ideas, which is why I like to play with new people all the time. Especially the
younger musicians. They're fearless. Joe used to play enormously complicated
rhythmic patterns once in a while and confuse me, and I'd get mad. Now I'd just
laugh. Playing with lots and lots of different people is like feeding the
computer: what they teach you may not come out right away, but it will
eventually. Unless you have a row with someone just before you play, your state
of mind doesn't affect you. You can feel gloomy, and it will turn out a
marvelous night. Or you can feel beautiful, and it will be a terrible night.
When I started out, I had the wish, the need, to compete with men. If somebody
said I sounded like a man, I was pleased. But I don't feel that way anymore. I
take pride in being a woman. Of course, I have been a leader most of my career,
and that helps. I don't feel I've ever been discriminated against job-wise. I
have always been paid what I was worth as a musician. So I feel I've been
practicing women's lib for years.”

"The Hickory
House was a good period for Jimmy and me. He was on the wagon and we were both
working, and we lived on the West Side. For the first time in my life, I began spend­ing all my waking
hours doing things that had to do with just me, and one of them was a big
romance that went on, or off and on, for years. But I wanted to keep things
together with Jimmy, and we bought a little house out in Merrick, Long Island, and Jimmy's daughter came and lived with us. Joe Morello left in nineteen
fifty-six to join Dave Brubeck, and it was terrible, but he had
to move on. In nineteen sixty-three, after the Hickory House gig was over and
I'd worked at the Strollers Club, in the old East Side music hall called The Establishment,
I went with Benny Goodman. I thought I'd be perfect for Benny, because I had
worked so long as a sideman with Jimmy, and of course Jimmy and Benny played
together in Chicago as kids. But I had the feeling I wasn't fitting in. Bobby Hackett
was in the band, and he'd tell me, 'Marian, don't play such far-out chords
behind Benny,' and I'd say, 'Well, why doesn't Benny say something to me?' One
night, Benny and I had a couple of drinks, and I told him I knew he wasn't
happy with me and to get someone else. All he said was 'Oh really, you don't
mind?' and he got John Bunch. So all of a sudden, nothing seemed right — my
work, my marriage, my romance. When I got back to New York, I started going to a psychiatrist, and I
stayed with him six years. He was tough but very good. He indirectly
precipitated a lot of things. The romance finally broke up, and I cried for a
week. Jimmy and I got divorced. I didn't really want to do it, and neither did
he, but it turned out we were right. Jimmy hasn't had a drink in five years,
and I'm twice as productive. We've never lost touch with each other. We still
talk on the phone almost every day, and he stops by all the time. In fact, he
said he'd come by today."

The doorbell
rings, and Marian McPartland jumps up. "Speak­ing of the devil! That'll be
the old man now." Jimmy McPart­land comes into the living room at ninety
miles an hour, gives her a peck on the cheek, plumps a big attaché case down on
the coffee table, takes off his blazer, and sits down. McPartland is
sixty-five, but he doesn't look over fifty. His handsome Irish face glows, and
he is salty and dapper. He is wearing a striped button-down shirt and a foulard
tie and blue checked pants.

He carries his
considerable girth the way Sydney Greenstreet did — as a badge rather than a
burden. His credentials are all in order — the founder, along with Bud Freeman
and Dave Tough and Eddie Condon, of the Chicago school of jazz; the first and foremost of
Bix Beiderbecke's admirers ("I like you, kid," Beiderbecke told him.
"You sound like me, but you don't copy me"); and a still lyrical and
inventive cornetist — and he wears them well. He opens the attaché case. It has
a cornet in it, and several hundred photographs. He puts the cornet be­side him
on the sofa and dumps the pictures on the coffee table. "My God, will you
look at these, Marian," he says, in a booming voice. "I found them
the other day out at the house, and some of them go back thirty or forty years.
There's your father, and there we are, with Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Shavers
and Louis Bellson. And here we are on the ship coming over. Look at you in the
GI togs and look at me. Thinsville."

She leans over his
shoulder and giggles.

"Here we are
playing in that pub in Eastbourne when we went to visit your family.

And here you are
holding a fish we caught in Wisconsin."

"They should
be put in a book, Jimmy. They'll just get lost." McPartland pulls a tape
out of the attaché case.

"A guy gave
me this on my South African trip, a couple of weeks ago. I'd never heard it
before. We made it in England in nineteen forty-nine. You were on piano and you wrote the
arrangements. It'll surprise you."

She puts the tape
on a machine, and Bix Beiderbecke's "In a Mist" starts. A complex
ensemble passage introduces a Jimmy McPartland solo. "Listen to that
intro," she says. "How awful."

"It's not,
it's not. The clarinet player is out of tune. You know, I don't sound bad. Not
bad at all." The tape finishes, and McPartland opens his mouth and points
at one of his upper front teeth. "Look at thiff," he says to her
through his finger. "The damn toof if moving back. Walking right back into
my mouf."

She stares at the
tooth, frowns, and straightens up. "You should go to Dr. Whitehorn,
Jimmy."

"I don't
know. I think I'll have to move my embouchure. I've already started, and it's a
bitch of a job — changing an embouchure youVe had almost fifty years." He
walks over to the window and puts his cornet to his mouth. He makes a little
sound halfway between a puff and a grunt, takes the mouth­piece away, makes the
sound again, takes the mouthpiece away again, and so on for two or three
minutes. The room is silent except for the mysterious little sounds, but
suddenly three or four full notes come out. "There. That's better. But
it's going to take a hell of a lot more work."

"Jimmy, are
we still going out to dinner?"

"Sure, babe.
That Brazilian place around the corner you like so much."

"I'll go get
dressed."

McPartland goes
through his embouchure priming process once more. Then he shuffles through the
photographs. "Marian is amazing. There's no one I'd rather be with as a
person, as an all-around human being. I have terrific respect for her as a
musician and as a person. She's talent personified. Musically, she has that
basic classical training, and she's meshed that and her jazz talent. She's just
begun to do it really successfully in the past two or three years. And she's a great accompanist. She flows with horns and singers like a conversation.
Marian didn't have good time when I first heard her. Her enthusiasm was overwhelming, and she'd
rush the beat. I'd tell her to go along with the rhythm, to take it easy. She
sounded like Fats Waller, and, in fact, the first tune I ever heard her play
was his 'Honeysuckle Rose.' It was in this tent in Belgium. I
go in and there's a girl playing piano and she looks English. I thought, God, this is awful. I wouldn't play with her until I'd had a
couple of drinks. I proposed after six or
seven weeks. Real offhand. If it doesn't work out,' I'd say, 'you can just go
back to England.'
She tried to act real GI, but I could see she was a fine, well-bred
person and not a Chicago juvenile delinquent like me.”

“My father was a
boxer and a musician and a professional baseball player with Anson's Colts,
which were the forerunners of the Chicago Cubs. He didn't take a drink until he was
twenty-one, and then he never stopped.
My brother Dick and I built a reputation as tough little punks, and we
were almost sent to reform school, but my mother saved us. She was a schoolteacher from Glasgow, and she knew German and worked as a
translator in court for all the Jewish people.
We were hauled up before the judge, but he knew my mother and told her
he'd let us off if she moved us to another neighborhood, and she did. She was a wonderful woman, and she always
treated me like King James himself. She had seven sisters, and her name was
Jeanne Munn. I'd go to her father's
house every Sunday — his name was Dugald Munn, and he was an inventor — and I'd
get fifteen cents for listening to him read from the Bible. He had a wee bit of a brogue, and I couldn't
understand a word he said. So visiting Marian's parents was like being in an
English movie to me. They were mid-Victorian in style. Her mother was in a
wheel­chair and very well-dressed and very particular. Everything at a certain
time, everything regulated. Tea at four, dinner at eight. If I was late coming
back from fishing or golf, Marian's mother would say, 'James, you're late.
We've started our tea/ Her father, who was a great engineer, used to knock his
brains out in his garden, and I'd help him until the pull of golf or fishing
got too strong. He was a nice, conservative gent."

Marian McPartland
has been standing for some moments in front of the sofa. She is in a Pucci-type
dress and white boots, and she has a fur coat over one arm. "Daddy once
slapped my hand for saying 'Blast it!''

McPartland digs a
frayed envelope out from under the photo­graphs and pours out a lot of German
currency. "We used to go into people's houses over there and rifle them.
That's where all this came from. Some of it is inflation money from after the
First War. It was a terrible thing to steal like that, but every­body did
it."

"You used to
appear with bagfuls of old cobwebby wine bottles."

"I was just
well-organized. Once, you needed a piano for a special show, and the colonel
gave me the name of this collabo­rator in the town. I got eight guys together
and a truck, and we went to his house and there was a beautiful piano.
Brand-new. I told him he'd get paid for it, and we brought it back to the
theater."

"I was really
impressed," she says. "You said you were going out to find me a new
piano and you did. It was one of your finest moments. Let's go and eat,
Jimmy."

It is Marian
McPartland's opening night at the Cafe Carlyle. It is her fourth long nightclub
gig of the past year, the three others having been at the Cookery, in the
Village, and at the Rowntowner Motel, in Rochester. It is in some ways an odd engagement, and
it suggests the country mouse's visit to the town mouse. The Cafe houses, for
eight months of the year, the elegant and fashionable supper-club singer and
pianist Bobby Short, and it is not the sort of room one associates with jazz;
indeed, no out-and-out jazz group has ever played there. By nine-forty-five
this evening, when the first set is scheduled to begin, the room is filled,
largely with friends and well-wishers. There is a table of business
acquaintances, most of whom are amateur musicians. Barney Josephson, the owner
of the Cookery, is at ringside with his wife. At the back of the room are Alec
Wilder and Jim Maher, the writer. Jimmy McPartland and Clark Terry are at
another table, and nearby are Clem De Rosa and pastor John Gensel, of the LutheranChurch. Marian McPartland sits down at the piano,
and she is a winsome sight. The room, with its fey, old-fashioned murals and
rather dowdy trappings, is out of the late thirties, and she brings it brightly
and instantly up to date. In the light, her hair is golden and bouffant, and
she is wearing an ensemble that has clearly been thought out to the last fold:
a close-fitting cranberry turtleneck, a gold belt, brocaded cranberry and gold
palazzo pants, and a gold pocketbook, which she plunks down on the piano. She
looks calm and collected, and, smiling slightly to herself, she goes
immediately into a pleasant, warming-up ver­sion of "It's a Wonderful
World." (Her accompanists are Rusty Gilder on bass and Joe Corsello on
drums.) Despite her out­ward cool, she sounds jumpy. Her chords blare a little,
an arpeggio stumbles, her time is a second or two off. In the next number, a
long, medium-tempo "Gypsy in My Soul," which she introduces as a
carry-over from the days at the Hickory House, she begins to relax, and the
glories of her style come into full view. Marian McPartland came of age when
pianistic giants roamed the earth — Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Bud
Powell — and their footsteps still echo dimly in her work.

But in the past
five years she has moved beyond adroit adula­tion into her own, special realm.
It is, in the way of Johnny Hodges and Sidney Bechet and Tatum, an emotional,
romantic, and highly inventive one. (Her sheer inventiveness is frighten­ing;
her ceaseless ideas sometimes trample one another.) Her slow ballads suggest
rain forests. The chords are massed and dark and overhanging, the harmonies
thick and new and al­most impenetrable. And her slow blues are much the same:
the tremolos are mountainous, the arpeggios cascades, the blue notes heavy and
keening. But her slow blues also have a singular Celtic bagpipe quality. Her
foliage is thinner at faster tempos. There are pauses between the stunning,
whipping single-note melodic lines, and her chords, often played off beat, are
used as recharging way stations. Her notes have room to breathe, and her
chordal passages are copses rather than jungles. "Gypsy in My Soul"
is sumptuous and crowded, and so is the theme from "Summer of '42."
But then she moves lightly and swiftly through medium-fast renditions of
"All the Things You Are," part of which is translated into
contrapuntal, Bach-like lines, and "Stompin' at the Savoy," which is full of laughing, winding
arpeggios. The room is swaying and rocking, and before it can subside she drops
abruptly into a delicate, veiled ad-lib reading of "Little Girl
Blue." It is a hymn, a lullaby, a crooning.

A bushy, luxuriant
slow blues goes by, and then she pays Alec Wilder tribute with a gentle
blending of his three best-known tunes — "I'll Be Around,"
"While We're Young," and "It's So Peaceful in the Country."
They are fresh, mindful versions, and Wilder, listening intently, looks
pleased. She closes the set with a rambunctious, homestretch "Royal Garden
Blues," and after the applause, which is long and cheerful, she stops
briefly at Wilder's table. He asks her how she feels. "I was flipping at
first," she replies. "But then the marvelous vibes from all these
dear people got to me, and it began to feel very good. Very, very good, in
fact. I think it's going to be a nice date."

The closing video
montage features Marian, Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums performing a 1954 version of
“Tickle Toe,” Lester Young’s famous hit with the Count Basie Band.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

“It was a thought that
repeated in my mind as I listened to this album. My ear would be captured by
the very personal way Monica's voice caressed a long-known melody, or by an
oblique turn of phrase or harmony chosen by her empathetic, almost telepathic,
accompanist, Beegie Adair. A song, such as "Change Partners" or
"Lullaby of the Leaves," might have at its foundation a rhythmic
feeling that simply drew me in and wouldn't let go. Sometimes, a lyric that I
hadn't been aware of, such as one in "Witchcraft," took me by
pleasant surprise and deeper into the song. As I listened, I noticed that small,
seemingly unimportant, variations in instrumentation (George Tidwell's
harmon-muted trumpet; a duo between Monica and Roger
Spencer's warm contrabass; a cheeky, Basie-like figure from the piano; a
lyrical tenor solo by Denis Solee) gave energy and a sense of lift to this
collection of wonderful songs.

Monica Ramey sings with grace
and elegance. Sometimes her voice moves into a territory of supple huskiness
that I associate with Ella Fitzgerald. Other times, it has an agility and
precision reminiscent of Barbra Streisand, someone I know is one of Monica's
hugest influences. Monica uses these abilities to deliver the world of the song
first to your ears (sometimes it's like she's singing directly to you), then to
a much deeper place where you can really feel it. And above everything it's the
feeling that's palpable, all the way through to the closing strains of
"Why Did I Choose You," the stunning duet between Monica and Beegie
that closes the set.

As the music played, I
remained pleasurably aware of the grain of emotion, heart, musical honesty and
beauty woven throughout this album. And all along the way, the little, subtle
things continued to accumulate, creating a harmonious, luminous whole.”

-Anthony Wilson, Jazz guitarist

"Now that the trend of
aging rockers cutting albums of show tunes and standards seems thankfully to
have run its course, we're back to vocalists with a real feel for and
understanding of the jazz tradition doing them justice. Nashville's
Monica Ramey is a shining example. Her excellent release Make Someone Happy
offers resourceful,

soaring and engaging
interpretations of material from The Great American Songbook."

- Ron Wynn, Nashville Scene

I am terrible at
this sort of thing, but the title of this piece is intended as a play-on-words
involving Lester Young’s nickname for the legendary Jazz vocalist, Billie
Holiday.

Lester, himself an
iconic tenor saxophonist, called Billie “Lady Day” and she called him “The
President” which was later shortened to “Prez.”

His sound on tenor
sax blended so well with Billie’s sultry voice that they became forever
associated with one another in the minds of many Jazz fans.

Given how well
vocalist Monica Ramey works with pianist Beegie Adair, the allusion to Billie
Holiday immediately came to mind and was reinforced by the fact that Monica and
Beegie are both ladies.

The interplay
between Monica’s song stylings and Beegie’s piano accompaniment is beautiful to
behold.

They fit together:
nothing strained or exaggerated. The music just flows between them. And
although they make it sound so effortless, what they do together and how well
they do it is really rare and very special.

Ron Wynn, writing
in the January 26, 2012 edition of The
Nashville Scene describes it this way:

“According to
Adair, Monica has a really good ear. “She can hear things in a song and do
things vocally that give me a lot of freedom as an accompanist. There are so
many singers who have pitch problems. She's also a really hard worker. She pays
attention and always strives for the right sound. Of course, she's studied
under Sandra (Dudley), so you know she's gotten really good
instruction.’

‘Beegie is a
vocalist's pianist,’ Ramey responds when asked what she likes about working
with Adair. ‘She knows lyrics. She's thoughtful about musical conversations,
and she creates so many avenues. If I just take the right approach, I know she'll
provide me with what I need.’

‘There are not
many singers who can hear those harmonic opportunities if the pianist takes
them,’ Adair says. ‘There are some singers I've played behind that never knew
what to do if you tried to go in a different direction. Monica can make those
moves. She really allows me to take a song in any direction.’”

In an ideal world,
Monica and Beegie would be appearing together at a supper club near you every
weekend. Of course, bassist Roger Spencer and drummer Chris Brown would have to be there, too;
nothing like a bassist to frame the bottom of the chord and the swishing sound
of brushes on a snare drum and riveted ride cymbal to add dimension to the
music.

You’d take your
best girl or guy [sounds better than “significant other”] for an early dinner
and while relaxing over a nice bottle of wine, Monica and Beegie’s trio would
play two, one hour sets at 8:30 and 10:30 PM filling your soul with the beauty of Jazz
that is sung and played to perfection.

Have you ever
noticed how approachable Jazz vocalists and musicians are? Jazz is an intimate music and I love hearing
it performed in an intimate setting. It’s great when you can reach out to one
of the musicians and compliment them on their playing, or request a tune to be
played during the next set or ask them to autograph their latest CD.

Perhaps Monica
would have already sung some of your favorite tunes in the first set, songs
like – As Long As I Live, I Thought About
You [Johnny Mercer’s lyrics!], I’ll
Close My Eyes, Witchcraft, This Could Be The Start Of Something Big, or Oh! Look at Me Now.

And maybe Monica
would agree to close the second set with just she and Beegie at the piano
poignantly performing Why Did I Choose
You? sending everybody home holding hands and dreamy-eyed with the
lovely lyrics and beautiful melody of this Michael Leonard and Herbert Martin
tune still fresh in their minds.

The musicianship that Monica and Beegie display is so good and made for such a
delightful evening for you and your guest that you drop by the bandstand on
your way out to thank them for the treat and promise to return the following
weekend.

And when you do,
Monica and Beegie’s trio sing and play more of your favorite songs among them: Lullaby of the Leaves, Whisper Not and Will
You Still Be Mine?

They also
introduce you to some music that is new to you like You Fascinate Me So and It
Amazes Me – both by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh and Fly Away with words and music by Lori Meecham and Beegie Adair.

Unfortunately,
this ideal world does not exist as many of us do not have a chance to drop by
our local Jazz bistro and supper club and listen to Monica and Beegie on a
regular basis [although if you are in the NYC area, they will be appearing at
Birdland on May 2, 2013].

So what’s the next
best thing?

How about a CD of
Monica, Beegie, Roger and Chris performing all of the tunes, one that you can listen to
over and over again to your heart’s content?

If this is the
case, then your heart will be contented because such a CD is set to be released
next month.

Chris DiGirolamo
and his team at Two for The Show Media is handling the press and publicity for
the forthcoming CD by Monica and Beegie Adair’s Trio which will be available
for purchase on February 26, 2013.

Chris has this to
say about Monica, Beegie and the recording in his media relations release:

“Vocalist Monica Ramey and The Beegie Adair
Trio release Self-titled debut from the Adair Music Group. February 26'",
2013

Vocalist Monica
Ramey's much-anticipated new album, 'Monica Ramey and the Beegie Adair Trio'
(Adair Music Group) is coming! Ramey's sophomore album accentuates the
undeniable chemistry of one of the world's most successful jazz trios (Beegie
Adair, piano; Roger Spencer, bass; Chris Brown, drums) with a
vocalist (Ramey) who elegantly interweaves lush, lyrical sophistication to an
already immaculate musical conversation. Produced by Adair and Spencer, the
album also features on two of the trio and Ramey's most beloved musical mates,
jazz masters George Tidwell and Denis Sole, on several tracks. The result is
the introduction and re-introduction of some of jazz's much adored and forgotten
songs and the introduction of an original tune, co-written by Adair.

"The album is
special because I learned these songs listening to the trio, live, over the
years at their weekly Nashville gig. They are all extremely accessible and easy to
love." boasts Ramey "I adore the trio's signature interpretation of a
few standards, as well as many tunes that are more obscure to even the truest
of jazz fans. So, it's a pleasure to be able to share them with everyone and
with such incomparable company."

"Producing
this project with Roger was an absolute joy." Adair states. "I'm extremely proud
of this album and believe the trio's fans will thoroughly enjoy it. Monica's
growing fan base will surely adore it as well. There are really so many reasons
to love this album, including the fact that it really swings!"

About Monica Ramey:

This kind of
reaction is a reoccurring theme in the case of Midwest native Monica Ramey and
artists like Donna McElroy, Jim Ferguson, Denis Solee, Jeff Steinberg, Lori
Mechem, Roger Spencer, George Tidwell, Sandra Dudley and
Beegie Adair are just a few who are singing her praise.

Monica is a native
of Francesville, one of Indiana's smallest towns. The youngest of three
children, her father is a retired farmer and her mother a retired music
teacher. As a child, Monica would sing and dance on stage with her mother's
high school show choir, and at the age of 3, she stood on the grand piano at
the school's cabaret and performed Tomorrow from the musical, Annie. By the age
of 11, she had become well known in Indiana after starring in several local and
professional Broadway musical productions. As a teenager, she studied at the Los AngelesCountyHigh School of the Arts, and in 1995, Monica was
selected to become a member of the GRAMMY National All American High School
Jazz Band and Choir.

This break would
become one of the most important opportunities in Monica's life. Being one of
12 selected nationally for the choir, Monica had little jazz experience, but
while performing with some of the music industry's finest, she discovered the
impact of jazz music in her own life and in our society. The responsibility all
performers have to its preservation and authenticity left a profound and
lasting impact on her.

Monica studied
Music Performance at IndianaStateUniversity and was a member of the ISU Jazz Singers.
She became a favorite singer among many faculty members and even the President
of the university. This led to many performances at university functions and
sporting events. She interned for the NARAS Foundation in Los Angeles, where the preservation of jazz music
became a focal point of her responsibilities.

In 2000, she moved
to Nashville to pursue her singing career, where she
discovered the Nashville Jazz Workshop. NJW has given Monica the opportunity to
study under some of Nashville finest musicians including Lori Mechem, Roger Spencer, Sandra Dudley, Beegie Adair, Jeff
Steinberg, Rod McGaha, Jim Ferguson, Roy Agee, Annie Sellick as well as create
a family away from home.

On her debut
album, Make Someone Happy, Monica is joined by the Lori Mechem Trio
and special guest, Beegie Adair. This special project hosts many standard tunes
with horn arrangements by Denis Solee and two original tunes by Lori Mechem,
Beegie Adair and Hal Stephens. Produced by Lori Mechem, Roger Spencer and Sandra Dudley, the album
captures the finest example of Monica's musical capabilities at this point in
her career. Make Someone Happy is receiving international airplay on jazz
radio, Pandora, Music Choice and DMX to name a few.

Her
much-anticipated second album, Monica Ramey and the Beegie Adair Trio,
accentuates the undeniable chemistry of one of the world's most successful jazz
trios (Beegie Adair, piano; Roger Spencer, bass; Chris Brown, drums) with a vocalist (Ramey) who
elegantly interweaves lush, lyrical sophistication to an already immaculate
musical conversation. Produced by Adair and Spencer, the album also features on
two of the trio and Ramey's most endeared musical mates, jazz masters George Tidwell
and Denis Sole, on several tracks. The result is the introduction and
re-introduction of some of jazz's most beloved and forgotten songs and the introduction
of an original tune, co-written by Adair.

Monica performs
regularly in various venues, festivals and private events throughout the U.S. including the legendary Birdland,
Nashville Jazz Workshop, F. Scott's and many others. When not studying or
performing, Monica enjoys spending time with her friends, her family and
volunteering for the Nashville Jazz Workshop. Monica also supports the Man
& Woman of the Year campaign for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.”

Here are two links
at which you can purchased the CD after its release date of 2/26/2013:

Saturday, January 26, 2013

There’s a reason
why the name for the long part of a guitar is “the neck.”

For there are
times when one becomes so frustrated trying to play such an unforgiving instrument
that one is tempted to strangle it by grabbing it by – you guessed it - “the
neck.”

Those who play
Jazz guitar seem destined to play it for how else would you explain the choice
of an instrument whose sound is difficult to sustain and whose volume can
rarely be heard above other instruments unless it is electrically amplified?

It’s also an
instrument that can easily get in the way by clashing with the piano as both
serve the function of feeding chords and “comping” [accompanying] in most Jazz
groups. Unless it is lightly “feathered” to the point of being more felt than
audible, many drummers dislike its intrusion as part of the rhythm section
because it makes the time sound chunky and/or feel stiff.

As a lead
instrument, it doesn’t phrase easily with other instruments such as the
trumpet, trombone or one of the saxes.

When it does find
a natural category for expression, for example, in combination with a Hammond
B-3 organ and drums, it risks disapproval due to the dislike that many have for
the organ in Jazz [“sounds comical;” “belongs at an ice show or a circus;”
“overbearing or domineering;” “Why doesn’t someone just pull the plug?”]

So what’s a
self-respecting Jazz guitarist to do in order to have a place in the music?

One avenue of
expression is to quietly and unobtrusively add a “light touch” to the rhythm
section as guitarist Eddie Condon did for many years in Chicago-style and
Dixieland Jazz groups or guitarist Freddie Green did as part of the Count Basie
Big Band.

Another is to
match up with other string instruments as did Eddie Lang with violinist Joe
Venuti or the legendary Django Reinhardt with violinist Stephane Grappelli and
the Hot Club of Paris.

In his essay The Electric Guitar and Vibraphone in Jazz:
Batteries Not Included [Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz [London/New York, OUP, 2000], Neil Tesser observed of
Django:

“Acoustic Jazz
guitar reached an apotheosis with Django Reinhardt [whose French guitar had an
extra internal sound chamber, which helped boost the volume]. Reinhardt founded
his vibrant melodies upon fervid folk rhythms and unexpected chord voicings,
the latter being inventions of necessity: a fire that damaged two fingers on
his left (chord-making) hand forced him to reimagine his approach to har­mony.
Reinhardt belied the then prevalent opinion that "Europeans can't play
jazz"; tapping his experiences as a minority "outsider" (he was
a Gypsy), he achieved an emotional power commensurate with that of jazz's
African-American inventors, and his finger-picking tech­nique continued to stun
jazz and even rock guitarists into the 1960s. Souvenirs (London) remains the best single-disc collection
of his work with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, costarring Reinhardt's
brilliant alter ego, violinist Stephane Grappelli.”

Elsewhere in his
essay, Neil points out that “Before amplification, the guitar had little impact
on Jazz, with a dozen or so important objections. … not until the mid-1930’s –
when Gibson and others began fitting Spanish-style guitars with electromagnetic
pickups, to amplify the strings themselves did Jazz guitarists have what they
needed [to sustain sound and to increase volume on the instrument]. …

Pound for pound,
no instrument has been more profoundly affected by twentieth-century technology
than the guitar ….”

The Jazz electric
guitar was pioneered by Charlie Christian who performed in Benny Goodman’s
Swing era small groups as well as with the early beboppers at Minton’s
Playhouse in Harlem before his death at a tragically early
age.

Oscar Moore with
Nat King Cole’s trio helped make the piano-bass-guitar trio a viable Jazz unit
- a tradition that was continued first by Barney Kessel and then by Herb Ellis
with pianist Oscar Peterson’s trio which included bassist Ray Brown. Pianist
Ahmad Jamal’s earliest trio also included a guitarist, Ray Crawford.

Pianist George
Shearing unique sound in the 1950s was made possible by the way in which the
now-amplified electric guitar was voiced in unison, but octaves apart, with the
piano and the vibraphone.

Hall could also
heat it up a bit as he demonstrated with Sonny Rollins’ quartet in the 1960’s
and Kenny Burrell used his “exceptionally mellow tone” [Tesser] to raise the
temperature in a variety of hard bop settings, including Hammond B-3 organist
Jimmy Smith’s trio. Kenny’s work may also have influenced that of guitarist
Grant Green “… whose soulful tone and
ringing lyricism distilled the bluesy essence of 1960’s hard bop.” [Tesser]

Wes Montgomery also
came along in the 1960’s and blew everybody away with his propulsive melodies
and his startlingly effective technique based on improvising in octaves.

As Wes explained
in a 1961 Downbeat interview with
Ralph J. Gleason:

”I’m so limited. I
have a lot of ideas - well, a lot of thoughts—that I'd like to see done with
the guitar. With the octaves, that was just a coincidence, going into octaves.
It's such a challenge yet, you know, and there's a lot that can be done with it
and with chord versions like block chords on piano. But each of these things
has a feeling of its own, and it takes so much time to develop all your
technique.

"I don't use
a pick at all, and that's one of the downfalls, too. In order to get a certain
amount of speed, you should use a pick, I think. You don't have to play fast,
but being able to play fast can cause you to phrase better. If you had the
technique you could phrase better, even if you don't play fast. I think you'd
have more control of the instrument.

"I didn't
like the sound of a pick. I tried it for, I guess, about two months. I didn't
even use my thumb at all. But after two months time, I still couldn't use the
pick. So I said, 'Well, which are you going to do?' I liked the tone better
with thumb, but I liked the technique with the pick. I couldn't have them both,
so I just have to cool.

"I think
every instrument should have a certain amount of tone quality within the
instrument, but I can't seem to get the right amplifiers and things to get this
thing out. I like to hear good phrasing. I'd like to hear a guitar play parts
like instead of playing melodic lines, leave that and play chord versions of
lines. Now, that's an awful hard thing to do, but it would be different. But I
think in those terms, or if a cat could use octaves for a line instead of one
note. Give you a double sound with a good tone to it. Should sound pretty good
if you got anoth­er blending instrument with it.”

Following its
pronounced appearance in organ trios and on ‘funky Jazz’ records in the 1960s, Jazz guitar seemed to veer off into an area
of music that came into existence with the rising popularity of Rock ‘n Roll during
the same period.

As Neil Tesser
goes on to explain in his essay: “It’s no surprise that the spread of Jazz
guitar paralleled the rise of rock. Funk Jazz had dipped into the blues, a
guitar-driven music and the primary precursor of Rock-and-Roll. As Rock
ascended in the 1960’s, the guitar came to dominate American music; as Rock and
Jazz converged, the guitar symbolized the evolving musical fusion.”

The Jazz guitar
also fused with other styles of music as well including Indian ragas, country
and western music and folk music. These myriad, hybrid styles can he heard in
the guitar playing of George Benson, Larry Coryell, John McLaughlin, Lenny
Breau, John Abercrombie, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny.

Of course, there continue
to be those Jazz guitarists who play in a more straight-ahead manner such as
Joe Pass, Pat Martino, Ed Bickert and Lorne Lofsky, Peter Bernstein, Jake
Langley and two, young Dutch guitarists based in Holland – Jesse van Ruller and
Martin van Iterson.

Fortunately, when
these plectarists grab the instrument by “the neck,” the result is one of the
loveliest and liveliest sounds in all of Jazz and one that’s easy for most of
us to identify with.

The guitar is
rivaled by only the human voice in its universality.

The following
video montage pays tribute to some of the many Jazz guitarists who have put a
smile on our face and a song in our heart over the years.

The tune is a
smokin’ version Freddie Hubbard’s Gibraltaras performed by Jake Langley on guitar,
Joey DeFrancesco on Hammond B-3 organ and drummer Terry Clarke.

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Lessons in Jazz: Movement and Momentum in Jazz Drumming

As you watch this demonstration video, notice how little movement there is as Evan Hughes works his way around the drums replicating Philly Joe Jones' four bar solo exchanges with the horns on "No Room For Squares." Notice, too, how the patterns of the syncopation he incorporates into his solos keeps the momentum of the piece moving forward, i.e., swinging. Jazz drumming is about making music. It is not about showing off technique. Close your eyes and listen to the complexity of the drum solos; then open them and see how this complexity comes from simple forms and economy of movement.

www.jazzleadsheets.com

Lessons in Jazz

How To Listen To What's Happening In The Music - John Swana - "Philly Jazz"

This piece was originally written for a friend to help him follow along with what was happening in the music.

The tune is Philly Jazz. It was written by trumpeter John Swana who, as you would imagine, hails from Philadelphia, and it appears on his On Target Criss Cross CD [1241]. Joining with him on the album are Dutch guitarist Jesse van Ruller, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Eric Harland.

After reading a brief introduction about how the tuneis structured, just follow the timings listed under each musician’s name under the video, open your ears and you’ll hear it all fall into place. You can always pause or re-set the video if you lose your place or wish to hear something again.

Philly Jazz is a typical 32-bar tune that is formed around four [4], eight [8]-bar sections.

This song structure is often referred to as “A-A-B-A.”

This first “A” = 8 bars or measures of the theme or melody [0-7 seconds of the video]

The second “A” = 8 bars or measures of the theme or melody repeated [8-14 seconds].

“B” = 8 bars or measures of an alternative melody sometimes called the release or the bridge [15-20 seconds]

The third “A” = 8 bars of the theme or melody restated [21-27 seconds].

Philly Jazz’s entire 32-bar A-A-B-A configuration is thus heard in the first 27 seconds of the video.

The melody and the related chords for the A-A-B-A song structure then become the basis upon which subsequent improvisations are developed; in this case by Swana, then by van Ruller and lastly by Harland: first in conjunction with Swana and van Ruller and then he solos alone. Patitucci does not solo on Philly Jazz.

To put it another way, the musicians repeat the 32 bar A-A-B-A sequence, each time making up and super-imposing new melodies on the tune’s chord progressions.

Every time a musician completes a 32-bar improvisation, this is referred to as a “chorus.”

Following these solos, the tune’s A-A-B-A pattern is repeated at 5:39 [A], 5:45 [A], 5:51 [B] and 5:58 [A], thus closing the track.

We thought it might be fun to post a listing of the timings for the tune and the improvised choruses to help you better hear what’s going in the music.

To make things a little less confusing, the first two “A’s” or 16 bars of each chorus have been combined.

So John Swana’s first chorus’ A/A = 28-40 seconds, its B = 41-46 and its last 8 = 47-54 seconds.

At this point, you may wish to “Play” the YouTube and follow along with the timings noted below it. Don’t be concerned about scrolling below the video’s images while you are checking the track timings as you can always go back and watch it again later once your ear is trained!

Lessons in Jazz

Bill Evans - On Developing His Own Voice

Jazz Master Class No. 3 - "Explorations"

This Jazz Master Class feature is new to the blog and may be a recurring one. Please let me know your thoughts about it by dropping me a note at scerra@roadrunner.com. Thanks.

“At the core of [Bill] Evans’s thought was the abandonment of the root to the bass. He commented: “If I am going to be sitting there playing roots, fifths, and full voicings, the bass is relegated to a time machine. He was not the first. to adopt this strategy. As far back as the mid-forties Ahmad Jamal had experimented in this way, and through the fifties Erroll Garner, Red Garland, and others took individual plunges into this uncharted rootless territory.

Evans's achievement lay in consolidation, in the creation of a self-sufficient left-hand language—a "voicing vernacular" peculiarly his own—based on the logical progression of one chord to the next while involving the minimum movement of the hand. This resulted in a continuity of sound in the middle register (still implied even when momentarily broken) that opened up areas for invention not only above but below it. The pianist's left hand spent much of its time around middle C, a good clean area of the piano where harmonic clusters are acoustically clearest. Thus was paved the way for the bass player's contrapuntal independence, an opportunity seized by Scott LaFaro.

As exhibited freely on Explorations, Evans's very personal "locked-hands" technique had now attained a fully formed order. Exploratory right-hand lines were shadowed by left-hand harmonies suspended from and carried by the singing, leading voice, the choice and tone of each note consummately judged. The whole moved as a loping unit, a unified concept in which the harmonic cushion was harnessed to the rhythmic contour of the top line. "Sweet and Lovely" offers a superb example, the chordal solo adding a harmonic zest, twice removed, to the background sequence.

Evans could sustain entire choruses in this way with apparent ease, and the phenomenon was his most striking contribution to the language of piano jazz. But it was an element of style—the personal aspect of playing that he was at pains to avoid teaching at Lenox, for fear of encouraging the mimicry of an idiom rather than the emergence of that idiom from the student's own creative spirit. Individuality of style, Evans believed, must be arrived at through the application of fundamental principles, as he himself had done ever since trying to become a jazz musician. Precisely by working at the essence of his material had he arrived at a stylistic dialect through which to express it.” [Peter Pettinger, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, pp. 105-106]

Lessons in Jazz

This Jazz Master Class feature is new to the blog and may be a recurring one. Please let me know your thoughts about it by dropping me a note at scerra@roadrunner.com. Thanks.

“It all goes from imitation to assimilation to innovation. You move from the imitation stage to the assimilation stage when you take little bits of things from different people and weld them into an identifiable style—creating your own style. Once you've created your own sound and you have a good sense of the history of the music, then you think of where the music hasn't gone and where it can go— and that's innovation.”

—Walter Bishop Jr.

“Many beginners select as their exclusive idol one major figure in jazz. They copy that idol's precise vocabulary, vocabulary usage, and tune treatment, striving to improvise in the idol's precise style. Progress toward such a goal is necessarily gradual; at times, it is barely evident to the aspiring performer. In many cases, it is through encounters with veterans that they notice signs of significant advancement. Bobby Rogovin remembers his astonishment and pride the day a friend of trumpeter Donald Byrd burst into Rogovin's practice studio and called out Byrd's name, having mistaken Rogovin's performance for that of his mentor. A saxophonist once received unexpected praise when musicians, having heard his improvisations filter through the walls of a neighboring apartment, inquired about the title of the Charlie Parker recording they thought they had just overheard. One anecdote that epitomizes a student's awareness of his own success concerns a young artist—a skilled "copier"—who once approached his idol on the bandstand during the latter's uninspired performance and declared with irony, "Man, you ain't you. I'm you."1

Although encouraging students initially to follow a particular musical master and acknowledging the discipline required of faithful understudies, seasoned improvisers ultimately view such achievements as limited. Curtis Fuller feels that it is "great for a musician to walk in the shoes of the fisherman" because imitation is a great compliment, but, he cautions, "I wouldn't want to lose my personality or shut down my development that way." Otherwise, he says, "I wouldn't have enhanced what's been done before. I would rather be an extension than a retention."

Direct counsel reinforces this view within the jazz community. It helped to be in an environment with "Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, and others who were so creative and like-minded," Max Roach admits. "We had all been instructed that to make an imprint of your own, you had to discover yourself. We fed off of each other, but encouraged each other to do

things that were individual." Everyone studied "the classics, like Bud studied Art Tatum," but they were aware of the "danger of concentrating so much on someone else's style that it was becoming predominant" in their own playing.

Some view too close an imitation of a master as an ethical issue. Arthur Rhames stopped trying to duplicate "exactly what other artists played" because he realized that "they were all playing out of their experiences, their lives— the things that happened to them." Even though he could "relate in a general way to most of it," he decided that jazz performance is "too personal" to try to duplicate exactly what other artists "were saying." There was, moreover, the spectre of imitators deliberately or inadvertently taking credit for musical ideas not original with them, or exhausting the professional jobs their mentors might otherwise have acquired. "He's living on Eddie Jefferson," George Johnson Jr. heard people say of him after he had absorbed his mentor's style. This did not really "hurt" Johnson's feelings at the time, because he was glad that others could relate him to "somebody." At the same time, he knew that he could not keep singing Jefferson's material because people would conclude that he was merely a "mimic."

Ultimately, Max Roach recalls, it was only after aspiring players had devoted years to developing their "own musical personality" that experts began "to look at you, to single you out and select you for their bands." Lester Young and others in Roach's early circle advised artists with cleverly rhymed aphorisms like "You can't join the throng 'til you write your own song."

One of the ways in which learners modify an initial mentor's influence is by studying the styles of other artists, a practice that is a natural outgrowth of their growing appreciation for the larger tradition of jazz. Barry Harris and his peers each had a particular idol, but as they grew they began "to see out a little bit." Suddenly, they stopped "idolizing" and listened "to all the giants." They realized that their tradition was "bigger than Bird, bigger than Bud Powell, much bigger than any of them." Even the greatest artists "hadn't done it all." Some youngsters, not intent upon exclusive apprenticeships, adopt this perspective from the start, absorbing features from different mentors through saturated listening, aural analysis, and transcription.” Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, [University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 120-121; Emphasis mine]

Lessons in Jazz

"Jazz can't be taught, but it can be learned." - Paul Desmond, alto saxophonist

This Jazz Master Class feature is new to the blog and may be a recurring one. Please let me know your thoughts about it by dropping me a note at scerra@roadrunner.com. Thanks.

“As learners endeavor to internalize the language of jazz, matters of physical constitution, relative mastery over instruments, and hearing acuity begin to dictate choices of material. Young pianists are literally able to grasp only those voicings of a mentor that lie within reach on the keyboard, just as young trumpeters are restricted to those patterns of an idol that require only moderate flexibility and strength to execute. When John McNeil discovered that he "didn't have the technique to copy Miles Davis's performance on E.S.P." he pursued an alternative course, "copping a lot from guys like Nat Adderley who were easier to hear—the stuff he played based on a blues scale especially. Also Chet Baker, when he wasn't moving fast, since he played real simple."

Another youngster, who yearned to improvise like John Coltrane, described months of concentrated study before he could perform "just a few phrases" from a Coltrane solo. At the peak of his frustration, the student was calmed by a dream in which Coltrane appeared to him and offered gentle encouragement: "You're doing fine; just keep it up." The student adds that Coltrane "made the phrases sound so easy on the record." It was not until he tried to learn them that he realized "how difficult they were to play, let alone to have thought up in the first place." Naivete occasionally proves to be an asset in negotiating the gulf between student and master. No one had explained to Gary Bartz how difficult Charlie Parker solos were, so he simply copied them along with those of lesser masters.

Faced with an idol's inaccessible vocabulary patterns, learners may adopt various tacks, for example, transposing the patterns into keys less difficult for them to perform. In Miles Davis's case, he played Dizzy Gillespie's figures in the middle and lower register of the trumpet because initially he could not perform or "hear music"—that is, imagine it precisely—in the trumpet's highest register as could Gillespie. Grappling with these limitations drives home to youngsters that they must gain such physical control over their instruments that their musical knowledge literally lies beneath their fingertips. As J. J. Johnson pointedly advised David Baker in his youth, "Any idea that you can't get out the other end of your horn is of absolutely no value in this music."

The most fundamental use of jazz vocabulary, then, requires the ability to perform patterns in time and at various tempos. This in turn requires learners to cultivate various technical performance skills tied to physical strength and agility. After George Duvivier trained himself to use two and three fingers for playing bass in his "solo work," his increased flexibility to reach across wide intervals on the same string and adjacent strings enabled him "to play ridiculous tempos without getting tired" and to play "groups of notes you can't possibly play with one [finger] because you can't move the finger back [to the next position] in time."

[Guitarist] Emily Remler recalls going "through just such a frustration. I'd go to a session, not be able to express myself on guitar, and cry afterwards—I was so miserable. My technique was lousy, and my time was bad. My time was bad basically because I couldn't get to the phrases in time." Remler's frustration led to an intensive practicing binge known among musicians as woodshedding. She withdrew temporarily from the jazz community and subjected herself to a musical discipline that necessarily carried over into other aspects of her lifestyle. "I played and practiced the guitar constantly, five hours a day. At one point, I went down to the Jersey shore and locked myself in a room for a month. I lost twenty pounds, stopped smoking, and became a serious guitar player. It took a lot of muscle building to reach the point where I got a really strong and full sound on the guitar. I practiced my tail off trying to play octaves and different things to build up my muscles." After months of practice, Remler began to overcome her problems. Eventually, she developed a "reservoir of technique" that she was able to "tap" for many years.” Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, [University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 114-115]

Jazz: America's Classical Music

Grover Sales

Jazz and African Rhythms – Grover Sales

"The rhythm of jazz sets it apart from other music, since rhythm has always been the most potent and body-based in the entire spectrum of sound. Gunther Schuller in his Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) claims that African rhythm is, by far, the most complicated form of music that exists. Only in the last half of this century, and only with the aid of sophisticated electronic devices, has the non-African mind been able to measure and comprehend the complexity of African rhythm. We have learned that master African drummers can sense and create differences of 1/12 second while engaged in ensemble playing that produces seven to eleven different musical lines. What is remarkable is not the number of lines, but, as Schuller notes: "in the case of a seven-part ensemble, six of the seven lines may operate in different metric patterns... staggered in such a way that the downbeats of these patterns rarely coincide.” Grover Sales, Jazz: America’s Classical Music [New York, DaCapo, 1992, 9. 27]

Jaki Byard on Pops

"I felt he was the most 'natural' man - playing, talking, singing - he was so perfectly natural that tears came to my eyes. I was very moved to be near the most natural of musicians."

John Lewis on Papa Joe Jones

“You heard the time but it wasn’t a ponderous thing that dictated where the phrases would go. The band played the arrangements and the soloists were free because the time didn’t force them into any places they didn’t want to go.”

Gerry Mulligan on Jack Teagarden

"He had everything a great Jazz musician needs to have: a beautiful sound, a wonderful melodic sense, a deep feeling, a swinging beat and the ability to make everything - even the most difficult things - sound relaxed and easy."

Louie Bellson: Drummer Extraordinaire

[Lester Young to Louie Bellson] ""Lady Bellson, just play titty-boom, titty-boom, and don't drop no bombs!"

Playboy Magazine Cartoon

Artie Shaw on Louis Armstrong As Told to Gene Lees

Artie said, "You are too young to know the impact Louis had in the 1920s," he said. "By the time you were old enough to appreciate Louis, you had been hearing those who derived from him. You cannot imagine how radical he was to all of us. Revolutionary. He defined not only how you play a trumpet solo but how you play a solo on any instrument. Had Louis Armstrong never lived, I suppose there would be a jazz, but it would be very different."

Pops

"You really can't play anything that Louis hasn't played, I mean, even modern." Miles Davis